Milton's Mary: Suspending Song in the Nativity Ode Author(S): Anton Vander Zee Source: Modern Philology, Vol

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Milton's Mary: Suspending Song in the Nativity Ode Author(s): Anton Vander Zee Source: Modern Philology, Vol. 108, No. 3 (February 2011), pp. 375-399 Published by: The University of Chicago Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/656677 . Accessed: 15/04/2011 11:02

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http://www.jstor.org Milton’s Mary: Suspending Song in the Nativity Ode

ANTON VANDER ZEE College of Charleston

Open the heavy book. Why couldn’t we have seen this old Nativity while we were at it? —the dark ajar, the rocks breaking with light, an undisturbed, unbreathing ﬂame, colorless, sparkless, freely fed on straw, and, lulled within, a family with pets, —and looked and looked our infant sight away.

(ELIZABETH BISHOP) To adore, or scorn an image, or protest, May all be bad; doubt wisely; in strange way To stand inquiring right, is not to stray.

1 (JOHN DONNE) Whether we think his poetry sublimely melliﬂuous, as did Keats, or ba- roquely stilted, as did T. S. Eliot, John Milton is a quintessentially musical poet. His commentators have frequently noted this, discussing everything from the poet’s technical knowledge of music to his engagement with various musical forms to what Marc Berley has recently called his ﬁgurative aspiration to song.2 Even amid such variety, however, a broad argumentative bias persists wherein critics tend to view song in Milton’s poetry as occupying the positive pole in a generative dialectical tension between the possibility of transcendence on the one hand and the carnal truth of post- lapsarian reality on the other.3 Of course, much of Milton’s poetry seems

1. Elizabeth Bishop, ‘‘Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance,’’ in The Com- plete Poems (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1979), 58–59; John Donne, ‘‘Satyre III,’’ lines 76–78, in The Complete Poetry of John Donne, ed. John T. Shawcross (New York University Press, 1968). 2. See Marc Berley, After the Heavenly Tune: English Poetry and the Aspiration to Song (Pitts- burgh: Duquesne University Press, 2000). I borrow Berley’s use of this phrase along with ‘‘trope of song.’’ 3. For one of the few discussions that successfully resists this argumentative bias, though not in relation to the Nativity Ode, see Stephen Buhler, ‘‘Counterpoint and Controversy: Mil- ton and the Critiques of Polyphonic Music,’’ Milton Studies 36 (1999): 1–17. Buhler incisively understands that song and music are themselves the vehicles for poetic thought and not merely external, transcendental props for hymnal aspiration. For representative discussions

375 376 MODERN PHILOLOGY to provide a ready script for such a reading, perhaps especially the poem I discuss below. But by limiting Milton’s trope of song to this theological and aesthetic extreme, critics have risked drowning out the subtler registers that his music often inhabits. Song in Milton’s poetry is not merely an unattainable ideal driving his divine drama but the generic, formal media- tion and expression of intense religiopolitical struggle. Milton’s precocious experiment with the genre of the Nativity carol provides a fitting test case for this broader critique while also prompting a more novel and specific thesis. In the Nativity Ode (published in the 1645 Poems), Milton’s musical troping, far from being a simple marker of transcendental aspiration, constitutes a suspended analogical space through which he grapples with one of the most contentious aesthetic, theological, and, ultimately, political issues pressing upon his poem’s compositional moment of 1629—a moment marked by portentous ideological divisions between an ascendant Laudian prelacy and a persistently resistant Puritan element that saw in the former’s high-church policies a dangerous echo of Rome. These divisions had deepened during the reign of James I, whose stance toward Rome softened in his later years, and were exacerbated when Charles I—with a French Catholic wife in tow and with decidedly ceremonialist ecclesiastical inclinations—held his official coronation in1626.4 The

of Pythagorean cosmology and the music of the spheres in relation to Renaissance poetics that do tend toward this bias, see S. K. Heninger, Touches of Sweet Harmony: Pythagorean Cosmol- ogy and Renaissance Poetics (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1974), 71; John Hollander, The Untuning of the Sky: Ideas of Music in English Poetry, 1500–1700 (Princeton University Press, 1961); Max Patrick and Roger Sundell, eds., Milton and the Art of Sacred Song (Madison: Univer- sity of Wisconsin Press, 1979); and Mary Oates O’Reilly, ‘‘A New Song: Singing Space in Mil- ton’s Nativity Ode,’’ George Herbert Journal 22 (1998–99): 95–116. For a more nuanced account of Milton’s attempt to find a speculative harmony—though it remains locked in a two-dimen- sional dialectical struggle between the transcendent harmony (musica mundana)andthefallen music (musica instrumentalis)—see Marc Berley, ‘‘Milton’s Earthly Grossness: Music and the Condition of the Poet in L’allegro and Il penseroso,’’ Milton Studies 30 (1993): 149–61. 4. For a discussion of this tension in relation to the image debate in terms of seventeenth- century literary culture, see Ernest Gilman, Iconoclasm and Poetry in the English Reformation: Down Went Dagon (University of Chicago Press, 1986); and Achsah Guibbory, Ceremony and Community from Herbert to Milton (Cambridge University Press, 1998). I borrow Guibbory’s use- ful distinction between ‘‘puritan’’ and ‘‘ceremonialist’’ tendencies in Stuart England (5). For more on the religious conflict in the decades leading up to the English Civil War, see Alison Shell, Catholicism, Controversy and the English Literary Imagination, 1558–1660 (Cambridge Uni- versity Press, 1999); Arthur F. Marotti, ed., Catholicism and Anti-Catholicism in Early Modern En- glish Texts (London: Macmillan, 1999), esp. Anthony Milton, ‘‘A Qualified Intolerance: the Limits and Ambiguities of Early Stuart Anti-Catholicism,’’ 85–115, and his ‘‘The Creation of Laudianism: A New Approach,’’ in Politics, Religion and Popularity in Early Stuart Britain: Essays in Honour of Conrad Russell, ed. Thomas Cogswell, Richard Cust, and Peter Lake (Cambridge University Press, 2002), 162–84; and Nicholas Tyacke, Aspects of English Protestantism, c. 1530– 1700 (Manchester University Press, 2001), 111–32. Anton Vander Zee Suspending Song in the Nativity Ode 377

Nativity Ode, with its iconoclastic reckonings, has been seen to map onto these historical fault lines quite easily.5 Looking back, it appears theologically consistent with Milton’s Reformist upbringing and with the influence of his frequently Puritan-leaning teachers; looking ahead, it offers an apt rehearsal for the antiprelatical tracts that he would compose just over a de- cade later. Yet even as Milton fills his hymnal ode with just the kind of resounding ideological consonance that his readers expect to find there, he simultaneously offers an arresting instance of what John Donne, in the aboveepigraph,mighthavedeemedawiseandstrangedoubt.Though critics have increasingly made ample room for these doubts, permitting genuine ideological conflict to reverberate beyond any apparent consonance, Milton’s momentous revelation in the Nativity Ode may confound even those who privilege his early, searching ambivalence.6 Indeed, con- stellating its constitutive religiopolitical tensions in a formal structure that disguises as much as it discloses, this iconoclastic ode by a radically Protes- tant poet harbors a veiled, conflicted, yet finely visible emblem of Roman Catholic veneration: Milton’s Mary is the iconic Maria lactans,thenursing mother. But before we meet her, we must first turn to where the music starts. Milton’s ideas regarding the status of poetic singing have their roots in his second prolusion ‘‘On the Harmony of the Spheres,’’ an academic exercise from his days at Christ’s College. In this prolusion, rather than chime in with Aristotle in proclaiming the quaintness of Pythagoras’s theory of harmony, Milton playfully defends him, chiding critics both ancient and modern for so naively taking a thinker of such stature at his word: ‘‘Surely, if [Pythagoras] held any doctrine of the harmony of the spheres or taught that the heavens revolve in unison with some sweet melody,’’ Milton contends, ‘‘it was only as a means of suggesting allegorically the close interrela-

5. Cedric C. Brown, for example, describes the Nativity Ode as a ‘‘militantly anti-Catholic Pindaric’’ (‘‘A King James Bible, Protestant Nationalism, and Boy Milton,’’ in Form and Reform in Renaissance England, ed. Amy Boesky and Mary Thomas Crane [Newark: University of Dela- ware Press, 2000], 284). Barbara Lewalski sees its ‘‘Puritan anxieties’’ and ‘‘reformist politics’’ clearly laid out in the forced exodus of the false gods, which takes up nearly nine stanzas of the poem (‘‘How Radical Was the Young Milton?’’ in Milton and Heresy, ed. Stephen B. Dobranski and John P. Rumrich [Cambridge University Press, 1998], 54). For additional readings of Mil- ton’s youthful radicalism, see Stella P. Revard, Milton and the Tangles of Neaera’s Hair : The Mak- ing of the 1645 ‘‘ Poems’’ (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1997), 64–69; David Norbrook, Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance (Boston: Routledge, 1984), 238–39; and Michael Wilding, Dragon’s Teeth: Literature in the English Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987), 7–27. 6. For a discussion of the importance of recognizing certain ‘‘exegetical aporias’’ that per- sist even as critics have privileged irresolvable nodes of conflict in Milton’s poetry, see Neil D. Graves, ‘‘Typological Aporias in Paradise Lost,’’ Modern Philology 104 (2006): 174. On the tension in Milton scholarship between seeking out ideological consistence and recognition of deep notes of conflict, see Servgiusz Michalski, The Reformation and the Visual Arts: The Protes- tant Image Question in Western and Eastern Europe (London: Routledge, 1993). 378 MODERN PHILOLOGY tion of the orbs and their uniform revolution in accordance with the laws of destiny for ever.’’ Laying the allegorical groundwork for his own ideas of song, Milton further underscores the absurdity of claiming literality for such richly layered poetic thought: ‘‘In this [Pythagoras] followed the example of the poets, or (what is almost the same thing) of the divine ora- cles, who never display before the eyes of the vulgar any holy or secret mystery unless it be in some way cloaked or veiled.’’7 Through what might appear to be a mere flight of rhetorical fancy, Milton discloses his sense of how truth enters the world as he casts the veiling activity of poetry as a human and poetic necessity. Truth must approach our ears in disguise, and Milton, following Pythagoras, offers the trope of song as the favored vehicle for this figurative conveyance. Although Milton couches his defense of Pythagoras in fittingly Platonic terms, this idea that truth is often buried in figures and allegorical tropes merely recasts basic modes of biblical exegesis and devotional meditation that were increasingly employed in post- Reformation England.8 That this argument from the second prolusion finds a poetic testing ground in the sacred strains of the Nativity Ode, then, should come as no surprise. Once we begin to grasp the poem’s investment in biblical tropes and typology, we can begin to understand the formal means by which Milton suggestively disguises its controversial investment in Marian imagery, a presence routinely elided by critics who choose to hear in this early poem only the authentic source and substance of the poet’s youthful, often radical aspiration to song. David Quint, maintaining the significance of Milton’s musical troping in just this sense of source and substance, uses the second prolusion to help drive his argument that the poet’s overarching goal in the Nativity Ode is to construct ‘‘a purified poetry that separates itself from a fleshly pagan inspi- ration.’’9 Noting the severe difficulties that such a project presents a mere mortal such as Milton, Quint suggests that the Nativity Ode ‘‘succeeds by staging the failure of its fondest dreams’’ (195). Surely many great poems could be made to fit this scheme, and especially those of Milton—a poet for whom the Fall and the resultant need for divine grace constitute the dialectical master trope of his poetic and theological imagination. Indeed, we need look no further than ‘‘At a Solemn Music’’ (1645) to hear Milton

7. John Milton, ‘‘On the Harmony of the Spheres,’’ in Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. Don M. Wolfe, 8 vols. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1953–1982), 1:234–35. 8. See Barbara Lewalski, Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric (Prince- ton University Press, 1979), 72–146. For a deeper engagement with Lewalski’s discussion of Protestant modes of biblical exegesis, particularly concerning the tension between allegory and typology, see Thomas H. Luxon, Literal Figures: Puritan Allegory and the Reformation Crisis in Representation (University of Chicago Press, 1995), 40–44. 9. David Quint, ‘‘Expectation and Prematurity in Milton’s Nativity Ode,’’ Modern Philology 97 (1999): 195, hereafter cited parenthetically. Anton Vander Zee Suspending Song in the Nativity Ode 379 imploring the muses ‘‘to our high-raised fantasy present, / That undisturbed song of pure concent,’’ even though humans dwell in ‘‘dispropor- tioned sin’’and have ‘‘Broke the fair music.’’10 But if Quint gets something generally right here, he also gets something specifically wrong when it comes to the incarnational element in the Nativity Ode. Quint argues that Milton’s hymn ‘‘purifies itself of carnal images ...the forms of Nature and the human body’’ (204), noting later that ‘‘Milton does not appear to be able to come to terms imaginatively with the very event of incarnation he describes’’ (211). What follows should serve as an exhaustive proof that it has not been Milton, but Milton’s critics, who have been unable to come to terms imaginatively with the actual event of incarnation that Milton describes in the Nativity Ode, a poem best understood precisely as a densely formal and fraught encounter with the Marian element in the Nativity scene. Quint, however, remains in good company. His argument regarding the Nativity Ode’s rigorous eschewal of the Incarnation—indeed, of the carnal itself in the poem—echoes the critical consensus on the topic. One need only look back to J. B. Broadbent’s claim that the Nativity Ode is ‘‘notoriously deficient in body,’’or to Malcolm MacKenzie Ross’s sense that Milton ‘‘was unable poetically to imagine the humanity of God,’’or to Louis L. Martz’s more hyperbolic declaration that Milton’s early poem has pri- marily to do ‘‘with all the world except the manger scene’’ to see how per- functory the argument has become.11 To substantiate his own version of this claim, Quint takes Milton’s second prolusion as circumstantial evidence that ‘‘the fantasy of listening to the music of spheres lies at the very center of Milton’s hymn and, with it, the idea of overcoming original sin’’ (204). This remark on Milton’s ‘‘fantasy’’ underscores the extent to which Quint needs to cast the poet as naı¨vely earnest in his allegiance to these abstract ideals of music so that the reader can sense more fully the eventual inefficacy of that very earnestness. In order to make Milton’s early exercise play this role, however, Quint must ignore the self-conscious posturing and calculated tone of the prolusion itself. While it is not novel to note Milton’s

10. John Milton, ‘‘At a Solemn Music,’’ lines 5–6, 19, and 21, in The Poems of John Milton, ed. John Carey and Alistair Fowler (New York: Longman, 1968). References to Milton’s poetry are to this edition and are hereafter cited parenthetically by poem, book (where necessary), and line numbers. 11. See J. B. Broadbent, ‘‘The Nativity Ode,’’ in The Living Milton, ed. Frank Kermode (London: Routledge, 1960), 12–31; Malcolm MacKenzie Ross, Poetry and Dogma (New Bruns- wick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1954), 191; Louis L. Martz, The Poetry of Meditation: A Study in English Religious Literature of the Seventeenth Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1954), 37; and Rosemond Tuve, Images and Themes in Five Poems by Milton (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957), 41. See also Martin Evans, ‘‘A Poem of Absences,’’ Milton Quarterly 27 (1993): 120–27. 380 MODERN PHILOLOGY playfulness in this or any of his early exercises, what this might mean for the status of song in Milton’s early poetry, and perhaps across his entire oeuvre, has been routinely overlooked. Song in Milton’s poetry, and particularly in the Nativity Ode, is not, by default, that which aspires to purify or elide the carnal element. This might appear to be the case on the level of thepoem’snarrativeaction,obsessedasitiswithapoeticsofpurging.But a more attentive understanding of song in the Nativity Ode must take into account the suspended musical space of a more complex intellective and bodily action that incorporates the carnal as its raison d’eˆtre—not as its motivation for an escape to a separate purity. While the latter view might make Milton’s poem more dramatically satis- fying as his readers witness the poem’s pained staging of failures, such a perspective does not do justice to the confounding lyric space of the Nativ- ity Ode itself. In this early poem, Milton offers his first and most sustained meditation on the suspended space of song by way of a submerged frame narrative. To my knowledge, no critic has yet offered an adequate account of this framing action, though William Blake seems uncannily to sense Mil- ton’s meaning in his illustration of the hymn’s opening scene.12 In referring to the frame narrative, I do not mean the proem in which Milton announces the typological aspirations of his hymn while prompting a reluctant muse. I want instead to orient the present discussion toward the much less obvious and much more problematic frame narrative of the hymn proper. Readers often understand the final stanza of the poem as offering some resolution to the halting and anxious action that precedes it. Resisting this imposition of a serviceable telos at the poem’s conclusion, Milton instead implores the reader in this final stanza to reconsider the poem’s incarnational frame narrative, demanding that we return to the beginning of the hymn so that we might see anew the embedded incarnational subtext that has been present all along. Thus, it makes sense to begin where the Nativity Ode ends. At the beginning of the Ode’s final stanza, Milton thrusts the reader back into a temporal setting that the poem had strategically abandoned through its creation of a suspended mythological and musical space. After the newborn Messiah completes his dismissal of each false god in the pen-

12. William Blake, Illustrations to Milton’s Ode ‘‘On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity,’’ The Thomas Set, 1809, http://www.blakearchive.org. In William Blake’s illustration of the ‘‘De- scent of Peace,’’ he depicts parallel female figures: a personified Nature/Eve and Mary. Na- ture lies in front, covering her naked form with innocent snow. She faces Mary, who, reflecting Nature’s own painful sense of exposure, is in turn frontally exposed to the viewer. We also see Jesus as he never explicitly appears in the Nativity Ode —in Mary’s arms. Blake’s tendency to depict many of his characters in near-transparent garments works brilliantly with the poem’s trope of exposure and concealment. Anton Vander Zee Suspending Song in the Nativity Ode 381 ultimate stanza, we find ourselves again at the manger scene with the poem’s hero and his mother: But see the virgin blest, Hath laid her babe to rest. Time is our tedious song should here have ending: Heaven’s youngest teemed star Hath fixed her polished car, Her sleeping Lord with handmaid lamp attending: And all about the courtly stable, Bright-harnessed angels sit in order serviceable. (237–44) Modern readers too quickly gloss over Milton’s ‘‘But see,’’ as though it were a mere conjunction or mild interjection, thus missing its fundamen- tally reorienting adverbial quality. ‘‘But’’ in this context offers a pleading ‘‘only’’or ‘‘just,’’and when combined with the deictic imperative ‘‘see’’the phrase might approximate a belated ‘‘hark’’ or ‘‘behold.’’ If this jarring maneuver strikes the ear as somewhat awkward in its abruptness, the reader has been prepared for it all along. In his recent reading of the Nativity Ode, Stanley Fish scrutinizes the poem’s repeated pattern of action anticipated and then lamentably forgone as Milton shuttles between the prospective present tense and the retrospective past.13 Though Fish does not follow this logic to its conclusion in the Nativity Ode, the final stanza repeats this distinctive pattern again through its adverbial imperative: ‘‘But see.’’ This imploring statement promises to direct the reader’s attention to something about to occur but ultimately only points, through the past tense ‘‘Hath laid,’’ to an action already performed by the Blessed Virgin that the reader has somehow missed. We have not seen what we were intended to see, and the poetic journey, carried along by the poem’s hymnal aspirations and iconoclastic reckonings, now seems to be some kind of well- wrought hoax—a ‘‘tedious song’’indeed (239). All of this tells us much about how the Nativity Ode unfoldsasitshuttles between present and past, between what we have seen and what we have missed, but it does not tell us to what end it does so. For Fish, the poem valorizes inactivity, of the sort we see with the serviceable angels or even with the sleeping infant Messiah. Similarly for Quint, the poem ends on a note of tempered expectation ‘‘understood not so much as a negative prematurity but as a positive gathering of forces and patient waiting for the time when his poetic task will be ripe and his true subject be found’’ (216). It would seem that there exists a palpable desire to be done with this ‘‘tedious song’’

13. Stanley Fish, How Milton Works (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 307–25. 382 MODERN PHILOLOGY and to sit, at last, ‘‘in order serviceable’’ for poet and critic alike (239). But this final stanza raises a question that remains unanswered, a question that allows us to understand Milton’s final pose not as presenting a humble stasis in anticipation of the Nativity’s divine subject but instead as assuming a more uneasy, retrospective, and ambivalent stance in recognition of an alto- gether different presence that threatens to evade our gaze entirely. This question offers a viable reaction to Milton’s reorienting ‘‘But see,’’ and it can be stated as follows: from whence has the babe come that he is now laid to rest? When we encounter the ‘‘heaven-born-child’’ in the first stanza of the hymn proper, he is described precisely as he appears in the Gospel of Luke: ‘‘all meanly wrapped,’’ the newborn child ‘‘in the rude manger lies’’ (30–31). Later, in stanza 16, the babe is still prostrate, lying ‘‘in smiling infancy’’ (151). Then again in the third-to-last stanza, we see the babe, who, ‘‘to show his Godhead true, / Can in his swaddling bands con- trol the damned crew’’ (227–28). The infant Messiah—still in his manger garb, still bedded down—casts out these pretenders with little effort. Yet, after the infant’s apparently minor appearance in a poem presumably about the young Messiah, and after a final flourish with the penultimate stanza’s brilliant epic simile describing the sun in bed, we arrive again at the first lines of that vexing final stanza: ‘‘But see the virgin blest / Hath laid her babe to rest’’ (237). Unless we want to fault Milton for a kind of amateur sloppiness, or unless we conceive of some odd explanation where the babe has been literally laid to rest after a clearly figurative battle, we are forced to answer that the babe has come directly from his mother’s arms, or, more accurately, her chest. Though this late indication of Milton’s Maria lactans in the ode’s final stanza may at first seem overly subtle, the argument for Milton’s verbal picture of the Marian icon finds ample support in the first few stanzas of the hymn proper and, indeed, throughout the poem. And so, the answer pro- posed above to the initial question—from whence has the babe come that he is now laid to rest?—gives rise to another question that impels a return to the hymn’s beginning: at what point in the preceding narrative, given that we have ostensibly only seen Jesus lying down, was the babe taken up so that he may be said to have been laid to rest? The hymn begins: It was the winter wild While the heaven-born-child, All meanly wrapped in the rude manger lies; Nature in awe to him Had doffed her gaudy trim, With her great master so to sympathize: It was no season then for her To wanton with the sun her lusty paramour. (29–36) Anton Vander Zee Suspending Song in the Nativity Ode 383

The precise role of Nature here is routinely glossed over, though it is difficult to ignore how rigorously personified she is throughout the first two stanzas. At first, she stands ‘‘in awe to him,’’ subjected to a kind of sacred mystery. Next, in a move that is certainly not original to the young poet, Milton compares Nature to an adorned woman undressing, forcing herself to become accustomed in this ‘‘wild winter’’to a more chaste and humble disposition mirroring Christ’s own. One word, however, stands out even in the midst of this seemingly overwrought personification: ‘‘sympathize’’—the stanza’s first trisyllabic word. We might think of this as one of those words that Fish so highly privi- leges in Milton’s work. Such words, Fish suggests, reveal a ‘‘certain intensity’’ in the poet’s language; they ‘‘display a double meaning and structure that correspond to the distinction between inner and outer, the distinction between a deep truth always present and always governing and the appearances and surfaces that seem to be, or seek to be, divorced from it.’’14 Working with Fish’s idea of a certain lexical privileging, I want to put some pressure on Milton’s use of ‘‘sympathize’’ in this particular context. First, Nature’s sympathy anticipates the Messiah’s own extreme sympathy for humanity. In this sense, sympathy is a mere attribute functioning within the dominant tropes of prolepsis and irony. ‘‘Sympathy,’’ however, gains a deeper significance if we read it as a figure itself activating a complex web of metaphorical substitution and analogical comparison. To sympathize, according to the OED, is ‘‘to suffer with or like another.’’ Furthermore, in one of its obsolete meanings that would have been current for Milton and that makes more explicit the word’s latent figurality, to sympathize also means ‘‘to represent or express by something corresponding or fitting; to apprehend mentally by the analogy of something else.’’15 ‘‘ S y m p at h y ’’ t hu s exceeds its status as a mere attribute as it becomes instead a governing trope for the poem as a whole, providing a key to help unlock the Marian subtext. The presence of sympathy here pushes the reader not only to rec- ognize Nature’s extreme personification but to ask what this figure of Na- ture personified—if it forms more than a mere poetic adornment—might itself signify. Concentrating on Milton’s figure of Nature in the second stanza with this charged sense of analogical sympathy in mind, ‘‘she’’ does indeed emerge as more than simply a well-worn pastoral trope. Indeed, in this stanza’s grand conceit, Milton’s Mary—an icon in hieroglyph, an emble- matic speaking picture—begins to emerge more clearly through the bibli-

14. Ibid., 31. 15. OED Online, s.v. ‘‘sympathize,’’ http://www.oed.com; subsequent parenthetical references to the OED are to this online version. One might also note here the alchemical concept of sympathy. 384 MODERN PHILOLOGY cal and literary allusions that contribute to the Nativity Ode’s dense formal patterning: Only with speeches fair She woos the gentle air To hide her guilty front with innocent snow, And on her naked shame, Pollute with sinful blame, The saintly veil of maiden white to throw, Confounded, that her maker’s eyes Should look so near upon her foul deformities. (37–44) In one sense, to see Mary in Milton’s figure of Nature is simply to follow biblical precedent. The book of Isaiah offers just one of many instances where the birth of the Messiah is prefigured through organic metaphors: ‘‘Drop down, ye heavens, from above, and let the skies pour down righteousness: let the earth open, and let them bring forth salvation, and let righteousness spring up together’’ (Isaiah 45:8 [King James Version]). In a sermon preached before James I on Christmas Day, 1616, and published posthumously with William Laud’s assistance in 1628, Lancelot Andrewes describes the Virgin Mary as the terra promissionis, the land of promise, from which the root of Jesse will spring.16 Whether or not Milton would have been familiar with Andrewes’s sermon (he did compose an elegy on the bishop’s death in 1626), the figure that Andrewes employs here is not rare or inventive but is very much in keeping with modes of biblical exegesis and typology. Indeed, this particular Nativity sermon’s figurative depiction of the Virgin Mary is rooted firmly in the typological resonance of Psalm 85:11: ‘‘Truth shall spring out of the earth; and righteousness shall look down from heaven.’’ Mary’s role is central to the incarnation as literal bearer of the word, the virginal ‘‘Nature’’ from which the messianic ‘‘Truth’’ can arise. Poets, of course, regularly mined these biblical figures. But working with and beyond such biblical and poetic precedents, Milton intensifies the personification of Nature to such an extent that she breaks through the anthropomorphizing trope. To put it another way, what Milton ini- tially personifies he then renders strikingly and disturbingly human as this common figure exceeds its tropical bounds, doubling back on itself to inhabit the deep mystery of this carnal and incarnational moment. Sens- ing Mary’s presence in this personifying figure, we see her speaking, hid-

16. Lancelot Andrewes, XCVI sermons by the Right Honorable and Reverend Father in God, Lan- celot Andrewes, late Lord Bishop of Winchester. Published by His Majesties speciall command, 2nd. ed., ed. William Laud and John Buckeridge (London, 1629), 102. Anton Vander Zee Suspending Song in the Nativity Ode 385 ing herself; she is both the actor seducing—‘‘She woos’’(38)—and the acted upon, registering this sense of guilt, confounded that her ‘‘guilty front’’ (41) and ‘‘foul deformities’’ (44) lay exposed to the infant’s gaze.17 The ‘‘gentle air’’ (38) at the beginning of this stanza might seem to impair this reading; yet, attending to the unmistakable homophone echoing behind ‘‘air,’’ we can perhaps also hear the Virgin Mary wooing the gentle and divine ‘‘heir.’’ ‘‘Innocent snow’’ (39) refers to the newborn babe, with snow signifying redemption and forgiveness, as when Isaiah reports the Lord’s words: ‘‘Come now and let us reason together ...though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow’’ (Isaiah 1:18). Isaiah’s prophecy— unfolded through the figure of snow and amplified by the modifying inno- cence—forecasts the redemptive force that Christ himself would come to embody. This ‘‘innocentsnow’’finds an echo a few lines later in the ‘‘saintly veil of maiden white’’ (42)—a phrase similarly rich in its borrowing of biblical details, prominently recalling Christ’s Transfiguration in the Gospel of Mark, where ‘‘[ Jesus’s] raiment became shining, exceeding white as snow’’ (Mark 9:3). ‘‘Maiden’’ might seem to introduce yet another complication. In what sense, after all, could the infant be described as so oddly feminized? The ‘‘of ’’ operator here is ambiguous, however, as ‘‘maiden white’’ does not necessarily constitute a description of the ‘‘saintly veil’’; it may also indicate the origins of that ‘‘saintly veil’’that has come to cover Nature/Mary’s foul deformities. Thus, insofar as the ‘‘saintly veil’’ has become a figure for the newborn Christ, to be ‘‘of maiden’’ makes perfect sense. Christ’s mother Mary, after all, is also Christ’s Maiden: the phrase ‘‘Maiden Mary’’ was a common synonym for ‘‘Virgin Mary’’from early Middle English lyrics such as ‘‘I Sing of a Maiden’’ up through the seventeenth century and beyond (OED, s.v. ‘‘maiden’’). Furthermore, one might go so far as to suggest that even as Nature hiding her ‘‘guilty front’’ and ‘‘foul deformities’’ with innocent snow suggests a figurative echo for Mary’s act of bringing the infant Messiah to her chest, this scene in turn forms a typological afterimage of Eve covering her nakedness in the Garden of Eden. Thus, Mary and Eve merge in the figure of Nature as Milton condenses salvation history into

17. Ann Baynes Coiro recognizes in this moment of exposure ‘‘a rather shocking reference to female genitalia’’ (‘‘‘A Ball of Strife’: Caroline Poetry and Royal Marriage,’’ in The Royal Image: Representations of Charles I, ed. Thomas Corns [Cambridge University Press, 1999], 36). Though Coiro also senses a veiled Marian presence here, she reads Milton’s graphic imagery as describing the ‘‘act of birth’’rather than to what I understand to be the primary refer- ent: the iconic act of feeding. In the few pages that Coiro spends on the Nativity Ode,shesug- gests the poem’s implicit desire to help the reader see the image of the Virgin Mother ‘‘uncontaminated by sexual and idolatrous myths’’ (38). Missing the opportunity to note the extent to which Mary is present throughout Milton’s hymn, she instead reaffirms the common line that ‘‘[in] the Nativity Ode itself, as many critics have noted, there is a conspicuous absence of the bodily’’ (36). 386 MODERN PHILOLOGY this single moment where the Fall and the promise of resurrection appear in uncomfortably close proximity. In Milton’s revision of the sturdy trope of Mary as the new Eve, however, it is their fallenness—their guilt—rather than their original freedom from sin that links them.18 While the core elements of the Nativity scene are fully in place in these first two stanzas once we know where to look for them, the complex mesh of sympathy, shame, and seduction that permeate these stanzas have prov- en utterly distracting, even to the Nativity Ode’s best critics. Indeed, if this scene depicts the Virgin Mary nursing her child, the terms in which this happens seem untenable even within the history of the eroticized relation- ships between Mary and her devotees. Yet just as Milton boldly plays with pastoral tropes, he mitigates any offense they might cause in such a hymn by self-consciously revising and even negating them. We learn of Nature at the close of the previous stanza, for example, that ‘‘It was no season then for her / To wanton with the sun her lusty paramour’’(35–36). Correcting common tropes of romance and pastoral, Milton describes Nature’s need to adapt to the Messiah’s presence—to find the proper response, the proper season. In this image of Nature chastened, Milton finds a figure for his own need to reconceive his relationship to this event without ignor- ing the problematic, mediating presence of Mary. Of course, the words that Milton chooses— ‘‘lusty,’’ ‘‘paramour,’’ and ‘‘woo’’—still seem out of place in the manger scene. ‘‘Paramour,’’ however, was often used in a religious sense to refer to the Virgin Mary or Jesus Christ (OED,s.v.‘‘paramour’’). Certainly, a justification for ‘‘lusty’’ and ‘‘woo’’ exist as well; yet there remains, despite diligent use of the OED, an essential incongruity in this stanza’s overextended and wide-ranging conceit. That, however, is precisely the point: this figural and verbal layering, where the reader seems to get multiple stories simultaneously, makes it difficult to tell Milton’s reverence from his revulsion. His earnest attempts to cut through Puritan taboos on the question of Mary fade into an insouciant send-up of Romish fantasies concerning Mary; his deeply typological understanding of the Nativity’s biblical resonance confronts a sense of shame whereby Milton appearsasoffendedasheisawedbyMary’sexposurebeforetheinfant Messiah. Soliciting these divergent reactions from the young poet at a time of religious change and controversy, Milton’s Mary persists as a trenchant visual metaphor that helps him consider, at once, the divine mystery of the Incarnation and its place in both his own and his culture’s evolving religious sense.

18. Milton here grapples with the long and fraught debate about Mary’s immaculate conception—a belief in Mary’s sinlessness long celebrated but not doctrinally codiﬁed by the Catholic Church until 1854. Reformed theologian John Calvin argued against her immaculate conception, and reformed thought more generally resisted what was as much a subject for idolatrous iconography as the Maria lactans itself. Anton Vander Zee Suspending Song in the Nativity Ode 387

The theme of covering or veiling as it occurs both literally and figura- tively in this stanza and throughout the poem results in our being—like Nature, Eve, and Mary—confounded. How can one hide or cover up by bringing that which one is hiding from even closer, so that, as with Mary, ‘‘her maker’s eyes / Should look so near upon her foul deformities’’ (43– 44), her guilty, fallen front? No straightforward answer presents itself, and Milton does little to defuse the theological tension by offering a complex consolation in his third stanza’s initial couplet: ‘‘But he her fears to cease, / Sent down the meek-eyed Peace’’(45–46). With the masque-like descent of Peace, the resultant music of the spheres assumes its place among what critics have rightly identified as the early poetry’s courtly and aristocratic gestures that grate uncomfortably alongside the more radically Puritan elements.19 Yet this distracting range of reference, as it courses through the hymn, may constitute Milton’s own act of poetic concealment through which he has disguised the quieter, allusive music of his Marian frame narrative in the Nativity Ode —an act brilliantly reflecting the way Eve and Mary cover their guilty fronts. Even though Milton offers only a verbal image here, the visual intensity of the description registers what Ernest Gil- man has called, in more general relation to the image problem in post- Reformation England, the ‘‘simultaneously glorious and dangerous potential of the poem to become a speaking picture. ...For in its most tell- ing moments, the argument against sacred imagery drives below the realm of ‘external’ representation to relocate the iconoclastic struggle within the individual Christian.’’ And, as Gilman’s readings indicate, this iconoclastic struggle manifests itself in many individual poems insofar as ‘‘the most compelling texts often betray a consciousness of the image-debate that reflects on the process of their own composition.’’20 In this spirit, Milton’s Nativity Ode reveals a pictorial lyric within a lyric, a remarkable speaking picture through which the poet conceals his quiet act of Marian veneration precisely by bringing it close, by weaving it into the narrative structure of his hymn, and by making it the hidden heart and counterpoint of his sacred, often strident song. With the incarnational frame narrative firmly in place, returning with fresh eyes to the famously vexing penultimate stanza of the poem helps to fill in the picture. Here is the stanza in full: So when the sun in bed, Curtained with cloudy red,

19. Heather Dubrow notes a similar tension in ‘‘The Masquing of Genre in Comus,’’ Milton Studies 44 (2005): 62–83. Dubrow works against the prevailing accounts of Comus as a quintessentially reformed and radical masque by placing it more fully in its generic and cultural context. 20. Gilman, Iconoclasm and Poetry, 42, 11. 388 MODERN PHILOLOGY

Pillows his chin upon orient wave, The flocking shadows pale, Troop to the infernal jail, Each fettered ghost slips to his several grave, And the yellow-skirted fays, Fly after the night-steeds, leaving their moon-loved maze. (229–36) Picking up on the unavoidable homophone behind the ‘‘sun in bed,’’ the scene quickly morphs into a baroque and sensuous description of this most humble scene. As with the first two stanzas of the hymn proper, there seemstobesomethingamissaboutthisstanza.Numerouscriticshave noted that, in a scene foretelling the Son of God’s imminent rising, the details of bed and pillow seem far more suited for evening. For this reason, Arthur Barker among others has called Milton’s epic simile ‘‘unhappy’’ and ‘‘clumsy’’—a sentiment that has largely stuck. 21 If the present argument holds, however, in this key stanza the infant Messiah rises not from the man- gerbutfromhismother’sbreast.Thisbecomesevencleareraftersurveying the way similar tropes involving such figures and descriptors as ‘‘sun,’’ ‘‘bed,’’ ‘‘Orient,’’ and ‘‘wave’’ appear in Nativity poems roughly contempo- rary with Milton’s own. It helps that the immediate referents behind the tropes in these other poems are not nearly as veiled as they are in the Nativity Ode. A contempo- rary of Milton’s, Joseph Beaumont, composed his spiritually and erotically charged ‘‘Jesus inter ubera Mariae’’ ( Jesus between Mary’s breasts) as a highly focused meditation on Mary’s supreme role in the Nativity. Beau- mont’s poem begins: In the coolness of the day, The old world even, God all undressed went down Without His robe, without His crown, Into His private garden, there to lay On spicy bed His sweeter head. There He found two beds of spice, A double mount of lilies in whose top Two milky fountains bubbled up. He soon resolved: ‘‘And well I like!’’He cries, ‘‘ My t a b l e s pr e a d Upon my bed.’’22

21. Arthur Barker, ‘‘The Pattern of Milton’s Nativity Ode,’’ University of Toronto Quarterly 10 (1941): 167–81. 22. Joseph Beaumont, ‘‘Jesus inter ubera Mariae,’’ in The Minor Poems (Edinburgh Univer- sity Press, 1880), 16–17. Anton Vander Zee Suspending Song in the Nativity Ode 389

The first two stanzas of his poem employ stock tropes that help us to see more clearly Milton’s Maria lactans suggestively present in the penultimate stanza of the Nativity Ode. Beaumont, an ardent Catholic, repeatedly employs ‘‘bed’’ as a metaphor for female breasts while also giving Mary the distinct flavor of the spiced Orient. Here, the cliche´ sun/Son dyad is mir- rored in the more subtly inventive conceit of Mary as the authentic Orient, the true east and sacred source of the rising sun/Son. Such spiritual infatua- tion with breasts in general, and Mary’s breasts in particular, has its roots in the bawdier work of courtier poets, who pulled from a vast storehouse of figures and words to describe the female anatomy. In her comprehensive A History of the Breast, Marilyn Yolom writes of the early modern period that ‘‘never were more breast words available.’’ After providing numerous descriptors then in currency, she singles out the ‘‘euphemistic ...‘bed,’ and ‘fountain,’’’ as well as ‘‘geographical terms like ‘orbs,’ ‘globes,’ worlds,’ and ‘hemispheres.’’’23 The Nativity Ode’s ‘‘orient wave’’ on which the infant Messiah rests his chin thus subtly situates the figure of Mary as true east within the more debased subtexts of conquest and economy, perhaps another figure for Milton’s own internal conflict as he subtly traffics in Catholic iconography. Finally, in a move that is somewhat less subtle for the young Milton, how can a reader fully attuned to this Marian subtext read the poet’s ‘‘sun in bed, / Curtained with cloudy red’’ pillowing ‘‘his chin upon an orient wave’’ without recalling something like Robert Her- rick’s famous imaginings in ‘‘Upon the Nipples of Julia’s Breast’’ (1648) of that ‘‘red-Rose peeping through a white,’’ ‘‘a Strawberry ...half-drowned in Creame,’’ or ‘‘a pure smooth Pearle and Orient too’’?24 Milton’s penultimate stanza, then, far from being the poem’s foremost aberration as his critics seem to think, merely fills in this crucial scene in the Nativity Ode’s Marian imaginings. The narrative frame comes to a neat conclusion as the infant Messiah, taken up in the initial stanzas of the hymn proper, now wakes and rises from his mother’s breast where he had supped and slept peacefully through the poem’s pagan exodus, and from which, in the final stanza, he is laid to rest. With this Marian subtext now firmly in mind, one finds a few final pieces of evidence for Milton’s Maria lactans formally embedded in the final stanza, which I quote once more:

But see the virgin blest, Hath laid her babe to rest. Time is our tedious song should here have ending: Heaven’s youngest teemed star

23. Marilyn Yolom, A History of the Breast (New York: Knopf, 1997), 78. 24. Robert Herrick, ‘‘Upon the Nipples of Julia’s Breast,’’ lines 2, 6, and 8, in The Complete Poetry of Robert Herrick, ed. J. Max Patrick (New York: Doubleday, 1963), 221. 390 MODERN PHILOLOGY

Hath fixed her polished car, Her sleeping Lord with handmaid lamp attending: And all about the courtly stable, Bright-harnessed angels sit in order serviceable. (237–44) The separated pentameter rhyme pair in the third and sixth lines gener- ates the poem’s highly purposeful formal action. Echoing over and beyond the trimeter-rhymed couplets of lines 1 and 2, and 4 and 5, and the asymmetrical couplets of lines 7 and 8, the suspended couplet trains the ear to hear rhymes that sound out across lines and that echo behind other words. We see this just above with the homophonic sun /Son pair, just as we witnessed the effect earlier as ‘‘heir’’ echoed behind ‘‘air.’’ In the final stanza, then, if we attend to a pair of fleshy rhymes that echoes behind ‘‘blest’’ and ‘‘rest,’’ we can reply even more confidently in answer to our original question above—from whence has the babe come that he is now laid to rest?—that the babe had come from Mary’s chest, or, more accurately, her breast. Indeed, Milton prepares the reader’s ear for this echo a few stanzas earlier. After stanza 23 concluded with a portentous mention of ‘‘Isis and Orus’’ (212)—the godly mother-and-son pair often depicted in statuary in the image of the Isis lactans 25—Milton finds the restless Osiris in his coffin/chest: NorisOsirisseen In Memphian grove, or green, Trampling the unshowered grass with lowings loud: Nor can he be at rest Within his sacred chest, Naught but profoundest hell can be his shroud, In vain with timbrelled anthems dark The sable-stoled sorcerers bear his worshipped ark. (213–20) This stanza establishes the rhyme-echo pair of ‘‘rest’’ and chest’’ and does so in close proximity to what critics have recognized as a veiled reference to Mary in stanza 22’s ‘‘mooned Ashtaroth, / Heaven’s queen and mother both’’ (200–201), itself a subtle reference to that singular classical precedent for Marian iconography in the Isis lactans. Though, as noted above, the ‘‘sacred chest’’in stanza 24 refers to the coffin in which Osiris was mur-

25. See Thomas F. Mathews and Norman Muller, ‘‘Isis and Mary in Early Icons,’’ in Images of the Mother of God: Perceptions of the Theotokos in Byzantium, ed. Maria Vassilaki (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005), 3–12; Stephen Benko, The Virgin Goddess: Studies in the Pagan and Christian Roots of Mariology (Leiden: Brill Academic, 2004), 44-53; and Miri Ruben, Mother of God: A His- tory of the Virgin Mary (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 34–66. Anton Vander Zee Suspending Song in the Nativity Ode 391 dered, we have reason to find this particular chest somewhat ambiguous. Milton would have been aware of the iconographic slippage between Osi- ris and Horus, where Horus is viewed not so much as Osiris’s son but as his reincarnation. In other words, the suckling Horus, not unlike the infant Christ, is both father and son. When Milton implores us to ‘‘But see’’ that the ‘‘virgin blest / hath laid her babe to rest (237–38), to hear ‘‘virgin breast’’no longer seems quite so improbable. Indeed, it seems even less so if one notes that by inverting the standard syntactical order in which the modifying adjective precedes its subject—as in the ubiquitous epithet ‘‘Blessed Virgin’’—Milton creates the expectation for a noun. Thus, doubly, we might hear ‘‘virgin breast’’in place of ‘‘virgin blest.’’ Of course, one could argue that this anastrophic element, a staple of poetic embellishment particularly in poets stretching to make a rhyme, hardly warrants such scrutiny. It might, however, if we keep in mind that the phrase ‘‘Blessed Virgin’’ is not just any adjective- noun segment subject to syntactical inversion but a divine and sacred title in its own right. Consider that the phrase ‘‘Blessed Virgin’’ (variant spel- lings and forms included) appears over seventy times in Nativity- or Mar- ian-themed poems between 1500 and 1700, while ‘‘virgin blest’’ (variants included) appears to occur only in the Nativity Ode.26 Although such inver- sions necessarily appear less frequently than the common phrases they revise, we should at least entertain the possibility that, even as Milton presents his Maria lactans with such subtle ingenuity, he concurrently works a kind of deformation, lexically dismembering the ‘‘Blessed Virgin’’in a way that echoes, however faintly, the history of iconoclasm in relation to Marian statuary and painting.27 Thus, we have formally writ small in the final stanza the central tension that in fact permeates the Nativity Ode, pulling the young Milton, as he faces an exposed Mary, toward the divergent poles of reverence for this supremely incarnational moment and revulsion at its dangerously iconic and Romish resonance. Here, after the energetic and posturing distrac- tion that typifies the poem’s iconoclastic action, Milton implores himself and his reader to ‘‘But see’’ the other scene that has unfolded before our eyes. Of course, Mary’s presence in any Nativity poem should not surprise

26. Data retrieved using advanced search options available through the comprehensive Literature Online database, http://lion.chadwyck.com. 27. For images of Marian representations across the century with some striking images of desecrated images, see Caroline H. Ebertshaüser et al., Mary: Art, Culture, and Religion through the Ages, trans. Peter Heinegg (New York: Crossroads, 1998). For a condensed history of En- glish iconoclasm, see Julie Spraggon, Puritan Iconoclasm during the English Civil War (Wood- bridge: Boydell, 2003), 1–31. See also John Phillips, The Reformation of Images: Destruction of Art in England, 1535–1660 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973). 392 MODERN PHILOLOGY us; indeed, her exclusion would be the real aberration. What we should be surprised by here is the degree to which Milton’s poem exceeds the narrative cues provided in the Gospel accounts to indulge the charged and— for a young Reformed poet just beginning to find his footing in the esca- lating religious tensions around him—theologically controversial scene of the iconic Maria lactans. While I see Mary’s suggestive presence persisting throughout Milton’s Nativity Ode, Thomas Corns has recently reaffirmed the scholarly consensus, arguing that ‘‘Mary is a marginal figure’’ in the poem. Referring to the momentous final stanza, he contends that ‘‘we see her maternalism in no detail.’’28 Corns continues by suggesting—though he offers no detailed evidence for the claim—that explicit breast imagery appears frequently in Na- tivity poems composed by Protestant writers, adding that ‘‘Milton, who never invites his readers to consider the suckling Christ and who studiedly eschews the intimate dependencies of infancy, is the exception.’’29 Although Corns is wrong about Milton here, he might be right in a limited sense about Marian breast imagery more generally. His claim, however, fails to make the necessary distinction between a Laudian Protestant and, say, one cast in the mold of William Prynne. Mary’s presence signals profoundly different meanings in such divergent theologies. Furthermore, a survey of Nativ- ity poems by Richard Crashaw, William Dunbar, Henry Vaughan, Robert Southwell, Ben Jonson, John Donne, Robert Herrick, John Herbert, Fran- cis Quarles, Rowland Watkyns, Martin Lluelyn, Joseph Beaumont, William Cartwright, William Hammond, and John Collop yields no clear evidence for Corns’s claim.30 Crashaw and Beaumont depict the breast-feeding scene, but their status as Catholic converts makes this rather unsurpris- ing.31 Although Donne’s poetic imagination had a mania for iconography, and though he composed a number of poems that explicitly honor Mary, he never alludes to her in the act of feeding.32 In the Nativity poems of mainstream Anglicans such as George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, William Cartwright, and William Hammond, only the latter two draw attention to

28. Thomas N. Corns, ‘‘‘On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity,’ ‘The Nativity,’ ‘The Circum- cision,’ and ‘The Passion,’’’ in A Companion to Milton, ed. Thomas Corns (Malden, MA: Black- well, 2001), 227. 29. Ibid., 228. 30. Survey conducted using advanced search options through the Literature Online database. 31. See Joseph Beaumont, ‘‘Jesus inter ubera Mariae’’; and Richard Crashaw, ‘‘In the Holy Nativity of Our Lord God,’’in Steps to the Temple (Cambridge University Press, 1904), 203. 32. For more on the iconic in Donne, see Clayton MacKenzie, Emblem and Icon in John Donne’s Poetry and Prose (New York: Lang, 2001). Despite his proclivity for vividly rendered iconic scenes in certain poems, Donne’s specifically Marian meditations—including ‘‘Annunciation’’ and ‘‘Nativitie’’ from the ‘‘La Carona’’ sonnet cycle—do not depict the Maria lactans. Anton Vander Zee Suspending Song in the Nativity Ode 393 the scene of the Maria lactans.33 In short, few of the poets mentioned above easily corroborate Corns’s suggestion that there were plenty of non-Laud- ian—much less Puritan—Protestants presenting the Maria lactans in their poetry.34 I agree with Corns that Milton is exceptional, but for precisely the opposite reasons. The present argument and its almost exclusive emphasis on the Nativity Ode’s frame narrative resists being pulled into the poem’s hymnal core. I began this essay by noting the argumentative bias that favors song as the ideal vehicle for transcendence in Milton’s poetry, particularly in the early work. One way such a bias persists in criticism on the Nativity Ode appears in the attention routinely given to the poem’s intensely musical central stanzas. Corns illustrates this tendency while also nicely collating its critical heritage. After a review of well-known studies that detect certain numero- logically significant centers and intensities within the poem, Corns tabu- lates the results in a manner that suggests numerical centrality or specific- ity might help one measure the extent of song’s pure transcendence: ‘‘If the poem is considered as thirty-one stanzas long (that is, the four stanzas of the proem plus the hymn), then stanza XII of the hymn is the central stanza; if we take just the twenty-seven stanzas of the hymn, then stanza XIV is central.’’Taken together, Corns continues by way of quoting Neville Davies, ‘‘[these stanzas] frame ‘the magnificent stanza which most readers rightly and instinctively identify as the effective centre of the poem.’’’ This supremely musical stanza, channeled through Davies’s words again, appears ‘‘like an emperor with kings as attendants ...[in] a position of sover- eign honor.’’35 Davies’s choice of words here, along with Corns’s high ap- proval of them, attests to how utterly distracting these stanzas are—so distracting, in fact, that both critics fail to ask how there can be room for such self-important, embellished, and brash music in a poem that is sup- posed to chasten and clear the way for the true King. Here are the last two stanzas of the poem’s triumphant, triadic center: Ring out, ye crystal spheres, Once bless our human ears, (If ye have power to touch our senses so) And let your silver chime Move in melodious time; And let the base of heaven’s deep organ blow, And with your ninefold harmony

33. See William Hammond, ‘‘Upon the Nativity of our Savior and Sacrament Then Received,’’ in Poems (London, 1655), 84; and William Cartwright, ‘‘On the Circumcision,’’ in Comedies, Tragi-comedies, With other Poems (London, 1651), 318. 34. For more on various Protestant views on Mary, see George H. Tavard, The Thousand Faces of the Virgin Mary (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1996). 35. Corns, ‘‘On the Morning,’’229. 394 MODERN PHILOLOGY

Make up full consort to the angelic symphony. For if such holy song Enwrap our fancy long, Time will run back, and fetch the age of gold, And speckled vanity Will sicken soon and die, And lep’rous sin will melt from early mould, Andhellitselfwillpassaway, And leave her dolorous mansions to the peering day. (125–40) ‘‘But wisest fate says no’’ (149). Why? Because ‘‘The babe lies yet in smiling infancy’’ (151), which signals that Milton, witnessing the Nativity, will have to wait for the Crucifixion, Resurrection, and Second Coming before his divine vision, echoing Virgil’s, can come true. But perhaps wisest fate also denies this vision: if we take seriously Milton’s skeptical and conditional parenthetical in the eighth stanza, this music ringing from the heavenly spheres has not ‘‘the power to touch our senses so’’(127). John Calvin con- sistently voiced the broad Reformed distrust of, and anxiety over, the cor- rupting power of the sensual and bodily associations that iconic images solicit. Fittingly, he considered the ear, above all human sensors, as providing access to the divine, while the eye was thought considerably more sus- pect.36 This is a problem as well for the inner eye, as Calvin makes clear in the Institutes when he warns that ‘‘man’s mind is, after all, a perpetual forge of idols.’’37 Working against the undertow of this anxiety, and amid the thickness of the musical descriptors that fill the mind’s ear throughout the Nativity Ode —things ring out, silver chimes, organs blow—Milton’s parenthetical deflates the glorious pomp of music and directs our more earthly senses to the carnal scene upon Mary’s breast where the ‘‘smiling infant,’’ as I have demonstrated above, ‘‘lies.’’ Remarkably, even the Nativity Ode’s triumphant musical center both harbors and disguises the more carnal substance that is its true subject.38 It is not the purified music of Milton’s

36. See Michalski, Reformation and the Visual Arts,65. 37. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1957), 1.11.8. 38. Though it is not an argument I will pursue presently, it is interesting to consider that, pictorially, music is most often personified in the form of a woman. Furthermore, there are a number of works of art and emblems during and before the early modern period that depict a female Musica, or other goddesses related to music, as bare chested and at times lactating. The idea that music itself, in the context of Milton’s poem, has such a close relationship to Maria lactans opens yet another avenue to contemplating Mary’s often disguised presence in this poem. See Linda Phyllis Austern, ‘‘‘My Mother Musicke’: Music and Early Modern Fanta- sies of Embodiment,’’ in Maternal Measures: Figuring Caregiving in the Early Modern Period,ed. Naomi J. Miller and Naomi Yavneh (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2000), 239–81; see esp. fig. 14.7. Anton Vander Zee Suspending Song in the Nativity Ode 395 trope of song that aids in the dismissal of the ‘‘damned crew’’ but rather the quieter earthly music that plays alongside the poem’s more brash hymnal aspirations, a music hidden in parenthesis, behind the ‘‘sun in bed,’’ in the figures of Nature and Eve, in a stray references to maidens and par- amours, and in rhymes visible only to the mind’s eye. What reveals the essential Marian subtext in the Nativity Ode has everything to do, as Fish has recently noted, with what makes Milton or any great poet truly matter: questions of form pursued rigorously not in spite of the social, historical, and political but as a necessary way into them. It is perhaps more than a happy coincidence, then, that this poem—remind- ing us how necessary it remains to explore the complex, mediating space of form—is also a poem that itself constitutes an engagement with the problematic and supremely mediating presence of Mary. Of course, it is not likely that Milton was purposefully holding these formal and Marian anxieties in such provocative tension, though the poem offers a trenchant, if unintended, object lesson: insofar as we fail to engage the poem on the deeply formal levels it demands, we miss Milton’s Mary and the rich matrix of aesthetic, theological, and ultimately historical and political concerns that her formally veiled presence makes available.39 While there is not enough space remaining to explore all of these related concerns, we can at least begin to sketch out their complex resonance. In the five hundred years leading up to the Nativity Ode’s seventeenth- century moment, there emerged a rich tradition of Marian iconography that would, after the Reformation, be claimed by Catholics and reviled by a stricter caste of Protestants who detested what they considered to be mis- guided and heretical Mariolatry. That the young Milton saw fit to enter into this controversy in anything but a dismissive manner—that he, in fact, subtly situates his own reticent Maria lactans alongside the chastened singing space of the Nativity Ode —raises a number of questions. If the young Milton was in fact a radical, even Puritan-leaning Protestant, why would he indulge in such sensual and Catholic iconography, allowing this portrait of Mary to ring out across and beyond the poem even as all of the other unsavory idolatrous figures are forced from its divine vision? Or, conver- sely, if the young Milton was really not so radical, as a few commentators have argued, and if what we see is nothing more than the justly felt rever-

39. For more on this renewed interest in form and formalist criticism, see Stanley Fish, ‘‘Why Milton Matters; or, Against Historicism,’’ Milton Studies 44 (2004): 1–12; Mark Rasmus- sen, ed., Renaissance Literature and Its Formal Engagements (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002); Susan Wolfson, ed., Reading for Form (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007), and her Formal Charges: The Shaping of Poetry in British Romanticism (Stanford University Press, 1997); W. J. T. Mitchell, ‘‘The Commitment to Form; or, Still Crazy after All These Years,’’ PMLA 118 (2003): 321–25. 396 MODERN PHILOLOGY ence of a moderate and ceremonially inspired aristocrat,40 why is his vision so well hidden and so sullied by his self-conscious, ambivalently disgusted, misogynistic, and even parodic eroticization of Mary’s ‘‘foul deformities’’—something like a theological burlesque echoing the iconoclastic and Reformist stripping of the altars?41 While the above reading of Milton’s Nativity Ode contributes to our understanding of what this poem is about in some elemental way, it adds little to the biographical debate concerning the young Milton, a debate ef- fectively summed up in Barbara Lewalski’s ‘‘How Radical Was the Young Milton?’’42 The Nativity Ode has often served as a sounding board through which critics discover early evidence for everything from Milton’s radical, regicidal Puritanism to his still naive, nostalgic, and ceremonial royalism. But Milton’s Nativity poem is not a conclusive early sign of any single tendency—generic, political, theological, or otherwise. This is, after all, a poet

40. For a recent discussion Milton’s possible early royalism, see James D. Fleming, ‘‘Com- posing 1629,’’ Milton Quarterly 36 (2002): 20–33. For discussions of how a certain aristocratic or elite sensibilities clashes with Milton’s more explicitly radical Puritan poetics, see Dubrow, ‘‘Masquing of Genre’’; David Loewenstein, ‘‘‘Fair Offspring Nurs’t in Princely Lore’: On the Question of Milton’s Early Radicalism,’’ Milton Studies 28 (1992): 37–48; and Annabel Patter- son, ‘‘‘Forc’d Fingers’: Milton’s Early Poems and Ideological Constraint,’’ in ‘‘The Muses Com- mon-Weale’’: Poetry and Politics in the Seventeenth Century, ed. Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1988), 9–22. Rumors of Milton’s alleged Roman Catholicism—based in part on a separate rumor that his brother, Christopher, was a Catholic—have been disclaimed and have not been taken seriously by scholars over the last century. See A Milton Encyclopedia, ed. William B. Bunter (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1978), s.v. ‘‘Catholicism.’’ 41. That Milton makes the point of attaching the year 1629 to the composition of the poem, though it was not published until his 1645 Poems, only further complicates matters. See Fleming, who makes a provocative claim that Milton’s dating of Nativity Ode as ‘‘Com- pos’d 1629’’ was intended to signal a reactionary post-Caroline interpretation when read in the context of Nativity poems where the birth of Christ and the birth of one of Charles’s chil- dren were often simultaneously commemorated. Of course, my reading of the poem could substantiate this claim, but I prefer to think of Milton not as reactionary, and not even as merely productively confused, but as quite inventive in his desire to find a way—as a Protes- tant poet with Puritan leanings and a youthful member of an elite and aristocratic stratum of society who longed for recognition from that society—to both honor and scrutinize the carnal and Marian elements of the Incarnation. I disagree, therefore, with Fleming’s insinuation that Milton’s writing of a Nativity poem, simply because it increasingly became an un-Puritan thing to do after Charles’s wife successfully produced an heir in 1630 (thereby giving rise to a secular takeover of the sacred genre of the Nativity carol), necessarily makes its publication in 1645 reactionary. If one wants to speculate that Milton did indeed date the poem to 1629 as a conscious ruse, it could just as easily form a rebuke and deft refusal to acknowledge the new and, compared with Christ, false sons of Charles I. 42. For those not acquainted with this ongoing debate in Milton scholarship, Lewalski’s well-documented essay ‘‘How Radical Was the Young Milton?’’ is the place to start. Although her argument remains convincing, critics such as Dubrow and Fleming continue to compli- cate any overly schematic or rigid notion of Milton’s early radicalism. Anton Vander Zee Suspending Song in the Nativity Ode 397 who in his youth composed an elegy to Lancelot Andrewes—and, in his ‘‘An Epitaph on the Marchioness of Winchester’’ (1645), to the wife of an avowed Catholic—alongside numerous anti-Catholic poems denouncing the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. Fittingly, then, in place of the ideological clarity critics so often seek in the figures they study, the Nativity Ode offers a reflection of Milton’s early, searching ambivalence and a provocative first glance at how formally insinuating even his apprentice work could be. If this conclusion remains unsatisfactory in itself, the Nativity Ode also serves as a remarkable repository of his age’s anxieties surrounding the develop- ment of a viable Protestant poetics after over a century of theological and political conflict, both within England and on the international stage. Tracing the precise place of Milton’s Nativity Ode within this debate must be the subject of another essay. What we know now, quite crucially, is that Milton’s Mary is not cast out with the other dissemblers in the Nativity Ode’s central iconoclastic activity. Instead, she provides the essential back- ground activity and parallel frame narrative that precedes, saturates, and ultimately resists the poem’s mythic kenosis. The serviceable stasis that concludes the poem, then, should be read not as sedately anticipatory but as retrospective and inquiring. Registering the Marian presence in the Na- tivity Ode becomes a way for Milton to come to terms, meditatively and devo- tionally, with the divine mystery of the Incarnation—a mystery in which Mary,whethersheisviewedasasaintlymaidenorasasimplemother,plays a central role. This act of consideration was as important for Milton in the 1620s as it was, decades later, when Mary would again be granted a gener- ous and surprisingly prominent role as what Dayton Haskins describes as the literal ‘‘bearer of the Word’’ in Milton’s Paradise Regained (1680).43 Mary thus appears at opposite ends of Milton’s oeuvre, an indication of how the poet’s dedication to theological and devotional inquiry both self- consciously registers and finely eclipses the schematic proscriptions that an era’sprejudicesandanimositiespresented. I want to return, in conclusion, to the notion of song as a suspended space in Milton’s work. Song, so understood, has the potential to become both critical and self-critical; it creates a sonic space that suspends and acti-

43. Dayton Haskin, ‘‘Milton’s Portrait of Mary as a Bearer of the Word,’’ in Milton and the Idea of Women, ed. Julia M. Walker (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 169–84. For a more recent argument along these lines, see Theresa M. DiPasquale, Refiguring the Sacred Femi- nine (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2008). DiPasquale offers a rich discussion of the sacred feminine throughout Milton’s oeuvre, beginning with bright goddess of Arcades,moving through the virginal Lady of Comus and the sapient Eve, and concluding with a discussion of Mary in Paradise Regained that looks back to Haskin’s work. Although DiPasquale seems ex- traordinarily sensitive to the presence of the feminine sacred in Milton’s poetry and concludes with a coda on what she calls ‘‘Marian poetics’’ (313), she never mentions the Nativity Ode. 398 MODERN PHILOLOGY vates, rather than transcends, its constitutive tensions. If talking about lyric and song in this way feels a bit anachronistic in an essay on Milton—as though we could graft post-Kantian idealizations of the aesthetic back on to early modern poetics—it helps to recall how this formal, critical, historical, and musical suspending action of lyric song is something Milton seems consciously to enact throughout his poetry. In a most straightforward way, we see song suspended in the first lines of Paradise Lost (1667) with its first delayed imperative (literally: it takes six lines to get there), ‘‘Sing heavenly muse’’ (6). Similarly, in ‘‘Lycidas’’ (1638) Milton suspends song in anticipation of the answer to the question: ‘‘Who would not sing for Lycidas?’’ (10). Between the divergent musics of L’allegro and Il penseroso (1645), Milton suspends and brilliantly orchestrates a richly dialectical tension. We could also consider more broadly Milton’s inventive use of enjambment, a device whose chief formal effect is one of literal suspension. All of these technical aspects of suspension blend into a more abstract and formally self-conscious moment, similar to that found in the Nativity Ode, in the following passage describing hell in Paradise Lost : Others more mild Retreated in a silent valley, sing With notes angelic to many a harp Their own heroic deeds and hapless fall ... Their song was partial, but the harmony (What could it less when spirits immortal sing?) Suspended hell, and took with ravishment The thronging audience.

(2.547–55) Here, ‘‘suspended,’’which seems to be another one of those complex Fish- ian words, inhabits a range of signiﬁcations. Formally, it participates in the suspension enacted by the preceding parenthetical. Simultaneously, and in a less technical sense, it accentuates the theologically problematic nature of this passage. To suspend hell with song here might entail any number of things. First, according to the OED, it describes a punishment in the form of a ‘‘debarring or removal from.’’ To suspend is to ‘‘debar’’ or ‘‘de- fer,’’ but it might also mean to ‘‘hold in abeyance.’’ In the latter sense, to be suspended in song is to escape or forget, if only for a moment, hell’s painful reality. In a broader sense, the word connotes a ‘‘sustained holding or hanging, a maintenance of a certain state’’ of mind or being (OED,s.v. ‘‘suspend’’). Through this more capacious sense, Milton suspends this deeply moving scene in hell, if only momentarily, as something upon which his readers might reﬂect, revealing the power of lyric poetry to help us see what is hidden, to imagine what is not already determined, ‘‘to make,’’ in Robert Kaufman’s words, ‘‘song think and to make thought Anton Vander Zee Suspending Song in the Nativity Ode 399 sing.’’44 In Milton’s work, we can trace this lyrically suspended space all the way back to his meditation on the iconic Maria lactans, where song—already, prematurely—is the subtle medium through which the resounding tensions of the Fall, so deeply felt and formally charged, are suspended and—musically, anxiously—fretted.

44. Robert Kaufman, ‘‘Difﬁculty in Modern Poetry and Aesthetics,’’ in Just Being Difﬁcult? Academic Writing in the Public Arena, ed. Jonathan Culler and Kevin Lamb (Stanford University Press, 2003), 145.